Kumai's neglect is a historical accident. Born in 1930, he was a contemporary of such acclaimed "New Wave" directors as Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Oshima. Like Oshima, he was a man of the left. But unlike Oshima, the style of his films was conventional. He made straightforwardly dramatic films at a time when critics preferred the experimental. Yet though his work was never fashionable, it was always relevant.

The subject matter of Kumai's films was consistently controversial. He dealt with the prejudice faced by resident Koreans, hibakusha, the burakumin underclass and the karayuki-san: Japanese women sold into prostitution in Southeast Asia during the early 20th century. Rise, Fair Sun, shot in his native Nagano Prefecture, explored the plight of farmers once encouraged by the government to cultivate remote land, now perceived as an inconvenience in the face of expanding tourism. This film only looks more topical as Japan concretes over its last countryside. But Kumai's finest work has remained relevant even where circumstances have changed.

The Sea and Poison, made in 1986, is Kumai's most emotionally intense film, and his most revealing. Again he chose an incendiary subject: the vivisection of American prisoners of war by Japanese medics in the last years of World War II. Japan's major studios were reluctant to finance a film on such controversial themes, so Kumai shot it independently, on a tiny budget. He produced a film that was all the more horrifying because it does not demonize the culprits.

The early sections of the film focus on the miserable lives of the doctors and nurses as the war draws to its close. Against a backdrop of intensive bombing and shortages, they are bitter and disillu-sioned. Their efforts to save the lives of patients repeatedly fail. Relations among the staff are tense. The situation is bleak when the military enters the scene, offering prisoners of war as subjects for medical experiments.

The offer is made to seem reasonable. These men are responsible for the bombing of Japanese cities. They have been sentenced to death. It would be a waste merely to shoot them. Better that their deaths contribute to scientific progress. Despite their scruples, the protagonists are swayed into accepting this grim logic. In minute detail, we witness the process by which human beings steel them-selves to commit atrocities. Kumai explains everything, but excuses nothing. Exposing the motives and circumstances that turned doctors into war criminals, he incriminates his audience; we must ask if we, in the same situation, would have acted differently.

The story was drawn from a novel by Shusaku Endo. But its power lies in Kumai's way of filming events. He shot in black and white, muting the visceral impact of the sight of blood, and ensuring that the viewer's response is moral rather than physical revulsion. The editing is immaculate; we are never shown too much, but see enough to register the full horror of events. These are the simplest of techniques, but they create a film of astonishing intensity.

Today, The Sea and Poison seems more contemporary than ever. It stands as a corrective to the reductive moral and political assumptions now made by the Bush administration, which refuses to investigate the motivation of its antagonists, preferring to view the world according to simplistic divisions into good and evil. That is an ideology that largely refuses to investigate motivation, preferring simplistic divisions into good and evil. Kumai demonstrates that actions follow from circumstances. It is a simple point, but a vital one, and its political application is limitless.

Much of Kumai's other work has retained its relevance Japanese Archipelago, a thriller made in 1965, depicts an investigation into the murder of an American serviceman stationed in Japan, and uses this to mount an oblique critique of American foreign policy in Asia — a theme that had relevance in the early years of Vietnam but seems no less meaningful in a time when Washington has again opted for an interventionist foreign policy. Though Kei Kumai is dead, he speaks to the 21st century. He merits full retrospectives.

The Japan Times Weekly: June 23, 2007
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